Archives for September, 2008

The University of Marland’s Joint Quantum Institute has won an NSF Physics Frontier Center. $12.5 million over five years. This is the first frontier center devoted exclusively to quantum information science. Congrats to UM! Press release below the fold.

Scienceblogs has now passed its millionth comment! In celebration many of us are having our own local Scienceblogs million comment parties. See here for your local party. What does all that boring writing mean in the last paragraph? No need to read it. Just read this one if you’re going to be in Seattle at…

This morning, John McCain’s top economic adviser made a bit of a mistake: Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate’s top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry. “He did this,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his…

For many years, and in particular during my college years, I was a huge Pink Floyd fan. Indeed, I suspect the first trace of me on the internet probably involves a post on a Pink Floyd newsgroup of which I am now quite embarrassed (but my ideas was sound, damnit!). Thus it is with great…

Dum, dum, dum, DUM DUM No, it’s not the monolith from 2001, but instead Millikan library at Caltech which I’m visiting. If you’re ever around Caltech on Halloween, be sure to check out the pumpkin drop where frozen pumpkins are dropped off this gigantic monolith. I thought I saw a blue spark… Always a bit…

The new father, he of uncertain principles, has analyzed whether his science posts gain viewership over time. My biggest problem with writing scientific content into posts is that when I do that it totally messes up my google searching. I mean when I do that then I end up finding my own blog post when…